NW Delegation, Feds Air Views on Recovery Plans

by Staff
Columbia Basin Bulletin - September 15, 2000

Three days of hearings before two Senate subcommittees this week
provided the first public forum for a direct exchange of views on the
Clinton administration's salmon recovery plan between top federal
officials and their strongest critics in the Northwest congressional
delegation.

Republican senators were highly critical of the administration's draft
Columbia Basin salmon plan and said it must be drastically changed
before they could support it. They made a wide variety of general
demands and specific suggestions, with most endorsing the four Northwest
governors' agreement on principles for salmon recovery.

Shortly after the governors announced their agreement, federal officials
unveiled their long-awaited salmon strategy in July, along with a
legally required draft biological opinion on the federal hydropower
system. A congressional hearing to examine the proposal was scheduled to
take place at the time but had to be canceled at the last minute because
of unrelated problems.

The comprehensive plan calls for a wide array of management actions,
habitat restoration projects and restrictions on human activities to be
undertaken by federal, state and local government to restore 12
endangered salmon and steelhead runs in the basin. Factors affecting the
survival of the fish throughout their life cycle would be addressed, but
a decision on whether to tear down four dams on the lower Snake River
would be deferred for five to 10 years.

Republicans, including presidential candidate George W. Bush, oppose any
further consideration of dam removal and have criticized the
administration and Vice President Al Gore for failing to rule out the
option for the future.

At the first hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., chairman of
the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee's Water and Power
Subcommittee, told the officials, "You know what we oppose. Now give us
something to support."

Smith said the National Marine Fisheries Service's draft BiOp and the
administration's salmon strategy do not fill the bill. They are not "a
substitute for comprehensive, species-specific recovery plans (and)
neither has a well defined set of priorities or specific timelines for
implementation."

He noted that because of the salmon's two- to three-year life cycle,
actions must be taken in the first year or two of the plan for their
impact on adult survival rates to be known in time for the five-year
checkpoint on whether the plan is succeeding. "I agree with the position
of other leaders in the region that the timeframes under the biological
opinion should be adjusted both to hasten implementation and to allow
... at least two salmon life cycles to evaluate the impact of actions on
salmon survival rates."

"To date, NMFS' strategy amounts to 'spill 'em on the way out, club 'em
on the way back,' " he said.

"Propose something practical that can be implemented without running
over the rights of the people in the Northwest." Smith urged. "The
tribes and stakeholders in the region have made extensive suggestions
for activities that could quickly be implemented throughout the basin."

He said Northwest members stand ready to support funding for effective
salmon recovery measures affecting all four "H's" -- habitat, harvest,
hydropower and hatcheries.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that regardless of the disagreement over
the plan, Congress could pass several bills this year that have
bipartisan support and would help recover salmon. Those include a bill
to help fund installation of, and improvements to, irrigation fish
screens, incentives for irrigators to conserve water and authority for
additional habitat restoration in the lower Columbia River estuary.

Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., who is preparing legislation to restrict any
funding for further dam-breaching studies for one year, faulted the
plan's cost, poor scientific foundation and lack of population recovery
goals. Gorton said the proposal is "highly unrealistic, divisive and
would invite failure from the outset."

"Instead of doing the work and filling in their own scientific gaps,
NMFS has dumped a document on Northwest citizens that is over three
hundred pages in length, and contains an utterly astonishing set of
recommendations," Gorton said. "If accepted, these proposals would cost
hundreds of millions of dollars -- if not billions -- even before the
federal agencies have any idea how many fish they must recover or verify
that their proposals are scientifically valid."

The plan advocates measures that could "flood farmland, shut off more
irrigation ditches, dry up lakes dependent on recreation and tourism,
ration water rights, require the purchase of private lands and urge the
acquisition of water from Canada with electricity ratepayer dollars, and
force the spill of millions of cubic feet of water over dams that could
seriously threaten the reliability and supply of the region's electric
power," he said.

Instead, Gorton expressed support for the efforts of local volunteer
groups and the Northwest governors' plan.

The draft BiOp "mandates further development" of the dam breaching
option and directs the Corps of Engineers by fiscal year 2002 to seek
funding from Congress to complete preliminary engineering and design
work for potential removal of the lower Snake River dams in five years,
he complained.

"The document also officially opens the door for the potential removal
of dams other than those on the Snake River," Gorton added.

"I will introduce legislation preventing the use of any federal funds
toward breaching dams during this next fiscal year (2001). This will
ensure that scarce resources remain focused on measures proven to save
salmon, rather than be used to further federal agencies' threats to
implement dam removal," he said.

George Frampton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental
Quality, defended the strategy as "an all-options plan. That's what we
think the salmon need."

Frampton said there is still no regionwide consensus on the best path to
salmon recovery, but that he hoped the plan would form the basis for
one. The governors' proposal "has a great deal of overlap with our
approach," he said.

Frampton called for cooperation between the two parties, Congress and
the administration and the federal and state governments.

"If this isn't a partnership, it won't succeed," he said.

Frampton and NMFS regional director Will Stelle said that the final
BiOp, which is to be adopted by the end of this year, must be based on
sound science and be able to withstand legal attack in court next year.
"We obviously want to have the final plan as good as we can make it,"
Frampton said.

Stelle said that to succeed, the plan must be comprehensive. He warned
that choosing to implement only "the easy things" would erode its legal
defensibility. Inviting intervention by the federal courts would be "a
bad outcome for the Northwest," he said.

But Smith said he was concerned that "we are on a rushed timetable" that
is "setting us up for a fall." Members of Congress are being asked to
take costly, irreversible actions but are not convinced they are
worthwhile, he said.

"I don't want to put the region over a barrel," at a time when promising
new technologies -- such as fish-friendly turbines and surface
collectors for gathering migrating smolts in reservoirs and by-passing
them around dams -- are emerging, Smith said.

Col. Eric Mogren, Army Corps of Engineers deputy division engineer for
the Northwest division, confirmed that test surface collectors at lower
Granite Dam are being removed although they show promise. Mogren said
they were not designed for long-term use.

But preliminary monitoring results for new fish friendly turbines that
have been installed at Bonneville Dam show that survival rates still are
slightly better for smolts that are spilled over the dam, Corps
officials said.

Mogren said the Corps' final environmental impact statement, which is
due next year, may recommend such measures as an alternative to
breaching the lower Snake dams. He said he did not want to prejudge the
outcome of the EIS process by commenting extensively about new
technologies.

Gorton complained the administration was calling for huge expenditures
and extensive management actions without establishing goals for salmon
recovery.

Recovery goals for endangered Snake River stocks were established, but
NMFS stopped further work on a specific recovery plan in 1998 to focus
on a basinwide plan, Stelle said.

He downplayed the importance of having long-term delisting goals for
each salmon population. In the short term, the most important goal is to
improve replacement ratios for fish so that wild stocks are "at least
replacing themselves" and hopefully, increasing.

The absence of population goals for delisting runs "is not an
impediment" to recovery efforts, he said.

Stelle also fended off senators' suggestions that this year's abundant
salmon returns are a sign of recovery. Frampton noted that 90 percent
returning adults are hatchery fish.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said that Pacific Ocean conditions for salmon
may have entered a favorable cycle of increased productivity after years
of unfavorable conditions.

Stelle agreed that some data exists to support the theory but that it
was too early to tell. In addition, one or two years of high salmon runs
are not enough to show that recovery is occurring.

"We hope, we pray that ocean conditions are turning around and will stay
that way for 10 to 20 years," he said.

The good returns are also a result of years of effort by federal
agencies to improve salmon survival and passage through the hydropower
system. "I don't consider it $3 billion wasted," Stelle said. "We've
gotten better at moving fish through the system, and we shouldn't be shy
about it."

The same federal officials, except for Frampton, also testified at
hearings held by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, chairman of the Environment
and Public Works Committee's Fisheries, Wildlife and Water Subcommittee,
on Wednesday and Thursday.

Crapo supported the Northwest governors' proposal and called on federal
agencies to collaborate with them, state and tribal fisheries scientists
and regional stakeholders on a final BiOp and salmon plan.